Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Weick
Sensemaking in organizations
Sage Publications, 1995
the revision of those interpretations based on actions and its consequences. Sensemaking is about
authoring as well as interpretation, creation as well discovery.
Pg. 121: (Like in the work of Garfinkel on jurors choices), people start with an outcome in hand
a verdict, a choice and then render that outcome sensible by constructing a plausible story that
produced it (in the Garfinkels words, the interpretation makes good sense).
Pg. 12: Think about the wonderfully compact account of sensemaking mentioned by Graham
Wallas. The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning
before she spoke, said:How can I know what I think till I see what I say? This recipe is central
in sensemaking (). My act of speaking starts the sensemaking process.
Pg. 13: What makes current thinking about sensemaking robust is that both ethnomethodology
and dissonance theory (). What is unusual about the topic of sensemaking is that it is grounded as
much in deductions from well-articulated theories as it is in inductions from specific cases of
struggles to reduce ambiguity
Pg 13: The key distinction between sensemaking and interpretation is that sensemaking is about
the ways people generate what they interpret (). Jurors literally deliberate to discover what they
are talking about and what constitutes evidence. They look for meaningful consistencies in what has
been said, and then revise those consistencies.
Pg.13: A focus on sensemaking induces a mindset to focus on process, whereas this is less true
with interpretation (=product) (). The act of interpreting implies that something is there, a text in
the world, waiting to be discovered or approximated. Sensemaking, however, is less about
discovery than is about invention. To engage in sensemaking is to construct, filter, frame, create
facticity, and render the subjective into something more tangible.
Pg. 14: The concept of sensemaking is valuable because it highlights the invention that precedes
interpretation. It is also valuable because it implies a higher level of engagement by the actor ().
Sensemaking matters. A failure in sensemaking is consequential as well as existential. It throws into
question the nature the self and the world (). Whenever the sense is lost (=failure of efforts to
replace one sense of the world with another), the loss is deeply troubling, whereas the loss of an
interpretation is more like a nuisance (=interpretations can be added or dropped with less effect on
ones self-perceptions).
Pg. 15: The text metaphor represents the activity of social construction as a static result, implies
that meaning already exists and is waiting to be found rather than that is awaits construction that
might no happen (). Finally, what sensemaking is not is a metaphor. I say this because Morgan
and al. describe sensemaking as one of three metaphors (the others are language game and text).
Pg. 16: Sensemaking is what it says it is, namely, making something sensible. Sensemaking is to
be understood literally, not metaphorically (). This error of logical typing can be avoided if
sensemaking is separated from the class of interpretive activities it names and set above this
class as a higher level of abstraction that include them. Although the word sensemaking may
have an informal, poetic flavor, that should not mask the fact that it is literally just what it says it
is.
c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
Or: People concerned with identity in the context of others engage ongoing events from which they
extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively, all the while enacting more or less order into
those ongoing events.
Pg. 18: These seven characteristics serve as a rough guideline for inquiry into sensemaking
what sensemaking is, how it works, and where it can fail.
a) Grounded in identity construction
Pg. 18: Sensemaking begins with a sensemaker: How can I know what I think until I see what I
say? (). Any one sensemaker is, in Meads words, a parliament of selves.
Pg. 20: The sensemaker is himself or herself an ongoing puzzle undergoing continual
redefinition, coincident with presenting some self to others and trying to decide which self is
appropriate. Depending who I am, my definition of what is out there will also change.
Pg. 23/24: The idea that sensemaking is self-referential suggests that self, rather that environment,
may be the text in need of interpretation. How can I know who I am until I see what they do?
Something like that is implied in sensemaking grounded in identity. I make sense of whatever
happens around me by asking what implications do these events have for who I will be? (). What
the situation means is defined by who I become while dealing with it or what and who I represent. I
derive cues as to what the situation means from the self that feels most appropriate to deal with it,
and much less from what is going on out there.
b) Retrospective
Pg. 24: The creation of meaning is an attentional process, but is attention to which has already
occurred (). Actions are known only when they have been completed ().
Pg. 26: Meaning is not attached to the experience that is singled out. Instead, the meaning is in
the kind of attention that is directed to this experience (from a particular present)
Pg. 27: The important point is that retrospective sensemaking is an activity in which many
possible meanings may need to be synthesized, because many different projects are under way at
the time reflection takes place. The problem is that there are too many meanings, not too few. The
problem faced by the sensemaker is one of equivocality, not one of uncertainty. The problem is
confusion, not ignorance (). What people need when they are overwhelmed by equivocality is not
information, but values, priorities, and clarity about preferences to help them to be clear about
which projects matter.
Pg. 29: The feeling of order, clarity and rationality is an important goal of sensemaking, which
means that once this feeling is achieved, further retrospective processing stops.
Pg. 30: The dominance of retrospect in sensemaking is a major reason why students of
sensemaking find forecasting, contingency planning, strategic planning, and other magical probes
into the future wasteful and misleading if they are decoupled from reflective action and history.
Pg. 41: People who study sensemaking pay a lot of attention to talk, discourse, and conversation
because that is how a great deal of social contact is mediated () Weick (1985) argues that a
significant portion of the organizational environment consists of nothing more than talk, symbols,
promises, lies, interest, attention, threats, agreements, expectations, memories, rumors, indicators,
supporters, detractors, faith, suspicion, trust, appearances, loyalties, and commitments Words
induce stable connections, establish stable entities to which people can orient.
e) Ongoing
Pg. 43/4: Sensemaking never starts. The reason it never starts is that pure duration never stops.
People are always in the middle of things, which become things, only when those same people
focus on the past from some point beyond it (). To understand sensemaking is to be sensitive to
the ways in which people chop moments out of continuous flows and extract cues from those
moments (). Cohen, March and Olsen have remained sensitive to the reality of continuity,
thrownness, and flows in their insistence that streams of problems, solutions, people, and choices
flow through organizations and converge and diverge independent of human intention.
Pg 45: If people are in the middle, what are they in the middle of? One answer, as we saw earlier,
is projects () But, even though people are immersed in flows, they are seldom indifferent to what
passes them by. This is especially true for interruptions of projects. The reality of flows becomes
most apparent when that flow is interrupted. An interruption to a flow typically induces an
emotional response, which then paves the way for emotion to influence sensemaking. It is
precisely because ongoing flows are subject to interruption that sensemaking is infused with
feeling.
Pg. 46: Interruption is a signal that important changes have occurred in the environment. Thus a
key event for emotion is the interruption of an expectation (). Arousal should build more
quickly the more tightly organized an interrupted action sequence is.
Pg 46: If we apply these propositions to organizations, we start by asking, what is the
distribution of interruption in organizations? Where are interruptions most likely to occur,
and how organized are the actions and the plans that are likely to be interrupted? If we can
describe this, then we can predict where sensemaking will be specially influenced by
emotional experiences
Pg. 48/9: When people perform an organized action sequence and are interrupted, they try to
make sense of it. The longer they search, the higher the arousal, and the stronger the emotion. If the
interruption slows the accomplishment of an organized sequence, people are likely to experience
anger. If the interruption has accelerated accomplishment, then they are likely to experience
pleasure. If people find that the interruption can be circumvented, they experience relief. If they find
that the interruption has thwarted a higher level plan, then the anger is likely to turn into rage ().
Pg. 49: These emotions affect sensemaking because recall and retrospect tend to be mood
congruent. People remember events that have the same emotional tone as what they currently feel.
Anger at being interrupted should encourage recall of earlier events where feelings of anger were
dominant. These earlier moments of anger should stand out when people look back over their past
experience to discover similar events and what those previous events might suggest about the
meaning of present events. Past events are reconstructed in the present as explanations, not because
they look the same but because they feel the same (= to use a feeling-based memory to solve a
current cognitive puzzle = difficult sensemaking because it tries to mate two very different forms of
evidence = sensemaking is ongoing and neither starts fresh nor stops cleanly).
a) people need to distort and filter (with the errors, misperceptions and irrationalities of
humans);
b) sensemaking is about the embellishment and elaboration of a single point of reference or
extracted cue. Embellishment occurs when a cue is linked with a more general idea;
c) speed often reduces the necessity for accuracy in the sense that quick responses shape
events before they have become crystallized into a single meaning. A fast response can be
an influential response that enacts an environment;
d) circumscribed accuracy, not global accuracy: circumscribed accuracy is focused on
prediction of specific encounters in a limited number of contexts for a brief period;
e) the interpersonal, interactive, interdependent quality of organizational life (=interpersonal
perception, not object perception). Questions in organizations that look like they involve
global accuracy and object perception tend to be translated into questions of intentions and
personalities.
f) Accuracy is defined by instrumentality. Beliefs that counteract interruptions and facilitate
ongoing projects are treated as accurate. Judgements of accuracy are project specific and
pragmatic. Weick cita Hall: The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part
of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in
determining what shall be believed and what rejected (). What is believed as a
consequence of action is what makes sense. Accuracy is not the question;
g) Accurate perceptions have the power to immobilize. People who want to get into action
tend to simplify rather than elaborate (). Perceptions can never be accurate because by
the time people notice and name something, it has become something else and no longer
exists (). The actor who knows what he or she can do, and who shapes the
environment so that it needs precisely these capabilities, come close to perfect
accuracy. People construct that which construct them;
h) At the time of perception, it is almost impossible to tell whether the perception will prove
accurate or not.
Pg. 60/1: If accuracy is nice but not necessary in sensemaking, then what is necessary? ().
In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story (). Something that preserves
plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that
embodies past experience and expectations, something that resonates with other people,
something that can be constructed retrospectively but also can be used prospectively, something
that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to fit current
oddities, something that is fun to construct.
Pg. 61: Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially acceptable and credible (). An
obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help.
Pg 61: A good story, like a workable cause map, shows patterns that may already exist in the
puzzles an actor now faces, or patterns that could be created anew in the interest of more order
and sense in the future The stories are templates. They are products of previous efforts at
sensemaking. They explain. And they energize (=two important properties of sensemaking).